Page 1 of The Bounty
Prologue
Trouble had started the moment Melissa Cruz sauntered in his direction.
He should have run. Not that it would have mattered. Runners were her business. She would have caught him eventually. Made him the offer he hadn’t refused. And besides, where would he have run to, exactly? Over the glass barrier around his friends’ backyard and into the wide-open canyon below? Or behind the massive Venetian dessert table at their wedding?
He should have at least tried. If he’d avoided her long enough, then maybe her need for him would have passed. Or her offer would have come later, at a time when he wasn’t lonely, penniless, and wilting under the Southern California sun.
He should have steered clear altogether—of the wedding, of the bounty huntress in charge, of her assignment that had landed him in this complete and utter clusterfuck.
Disaster waiting for him on the other side of the door.
One bed and the last person he should climb into it with.
The runner he was chasing for her.
The bounty he was falling for.
One
Wags was born and raised in the East End. Summer swung unpredictably between sun and storms, with temps in the low- to mid-twenties Celsius, while winter was a gray, drippy affair with temps hovering just above freezing and the occasional Christmas flakes that rarely accumulated. In neither season was the weather dry, sunny, and pushing thirty-two degrees.
As he stood sweating under the San Diego sun at the Christmas-in-July wedding of his friends, Wags longed for London’s dreary weather. Hell, he’d even take summer in Vienna over this. His current residence ran hotter than London in the summers but not face-of-the-sun hot. He hadn’t been this hot and sweaty since his RAF days in the desert.
“You know, you can take off the coat.”
Wags turned from his view of the canyon on the other side of the glass wall around Marsh and Levi’s backyard to a similarly sweaty Sean Paxton, even dressed as he was in shorts and a linen shirt. Wags had seen the note on the wedding invite about informal attire, but he’d rushed straight from the station to the airport to the wedding, without a spare second or room enough in an airplane bathroom to change out of his suit.
He was paying for it now, his dress shirt soaked beneath his jacket. “No one wants to see that.”
Chuckling, Sean leaned against the wall beside him, gaze drifting over the canyon. “The movies make it seem like San Diego is all sand and waves,” the former FBI legat said. He’d since left the Bureau to marry his college sweethearts and run his family’s commodities empire. “But really, that’s only a tiny portion west of the freeway, and everything else is the desert.”
A desert their mutual friend and former colleague, Marsh, wanted to live in. Who today, under the searing sun, was dressed in flannel, denim, a cowboy hat, and boots, same as his husband, Levi. “I don’t know how they’re not melting,” Wags said with a jut of his chin toward the grooms.
Sean bumped his shoulder. “You managed in the desert, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, twenty years ago.”
“Well, Levi is used to this, and as for Marsh, he managed the desert too, and he grew up in hot and humid Texas.”
Groaning at the thought of humidity on top of this heat, Wags held his icy glass of club soda to his forehead, and Sean laughed before taking a sip of his own drink. “How are you, Wags?”
“Been better.” The past year’s lowlights included a divorce, a tiny short-term flat that wasn’t home, and more overtime hours than he’d ever worked, even as he anticipated getting the axe any day now. All because he’d done the right thing and helped Marsh, Levi, and Sean put away the bad guys. But at least he’d made it out of that mess alive—and sober for the first time in twenty-plus years. He held up his glass. “But getting better.”
“I’m glad, Wags, and we’re all glad you could make it today.” Sean clasped his shoulder and gave it a squeeze, the gesture and words warm. “I’m going to go see what trouble my wife and husband are up to.”
“I’m glad you’re doing better too, Sean.”
The former agent had always been friendly, but his gorgeous smile had never truly reached his eyes. He’d left a life and two loves behind when he’d joined the FBI, and now that he had them back and the life he’d always wanted, he was practically beaming. The fact that he’d officiated the wedding of his best friend today only made his smile wider. “Thank you.”
As Sean headed toward the side yard where his spouses were chatting with Marsh’s son, Wags’s attention was drawn in the opposite direction by Marsh’s booming laugh. His friend was all smiles today, wide and bright beneath his equally wide and bright white Stetson. Wags had been attracted to the man with so much life, had harbored a raging crush on him, but seeing Marsh with Levi last summer and again today, Wags couldn’t deny that there had been even more life there beneath Marsh’s swaggering surface, something only Levi had been able to unlock. And though it hadn’t been with him, Wags was happy to see his friend, a man he admired, so well settled.
And if Marsh could find happiness like that, if Sean could too, then maybe he…
Wags veered away from futile hopes and from the glass wall, ambling over to the massive Venetian dessert table and plucking his third—fourth—cannoli of the day. The click-clack of heels on flagstone made him glance up, made him pause mid lift of the pastry as Melissa Cruz approached. He’d met the former Special Agent in Charge turned bounty hunter last summer. She was the definition of impressive…and intimidating. She was also the definition of cool, dressed in a linen pant suit, with oversize sunglasses perched in the curls piled atop her head.
“Inspector Wagner,” she greeted him. “Just the man I’ve been looking for.”
“Not much to see here.” He wiped the sweat from his brow, then raked his hand through his hair, pushing back the damp, overlong strands. “Just a fortysomething man melting in the sun.”
